When the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) holds its national convention in April, the council of presidents will discuss implementation and costs of a system-wide drug policy.
As presently constituted, the NAIA (of which Saint Xavier is a member school) has no formal drug policy.
Individual schools are left to their own devices, choosing for themselves if they want to test athletes for drugs, and if so which drugs.
The NAIA does, however, take measures to ensure that their athletes are not abusing drugs.
“Each of our institutions is required to do substance abuse education on campus, and then they report that—what their education is—through their year-end report,” said Kristin Gillette, the NAIA’s director of champions of character.
The champions of character program is in place to emphasize good choices both within and outside of athletic competitions. But with limited fiscal resources, the programs that schools run are not extensive.
“Primarily, the substance abuse policy and how schools apply it is more centered towards alcohol use, but…for a performance-enhancing drug policy, we don’t have one at this time,” Gillette said.
But Gillette estimated that more than half of the member schools employ drug testing of athletes in some way or another, though this may not include testing for performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs).
“I think you’d find over 50% of our institutions have drug policies and test for [PEDs], and then along with that they’re going to have what the consequences are if a student athlete shows positive in that test,” said Gillette.
One reason that the NAIA has until now chosen to leave testing up to individual member schools is simply its scope and direction as an organization.
“One of the core components of the NAIA is that, unlike the NCAA [National Collegiate Athletic Association], we’re not an enforcing, police force organization,” said Lynn Meredith, the NAIA’s vice president of marketing and communications. “We’re membership-driven and [the current policy] is the policy that our members wanted to implement.”
But come April, the NAIA may implement a new policy. The proposed changes would come on two fronts. The most dramatic of the changes would be testing at championship events.
“The NAIA at the national office really oversees postseason play, and so currently membership is discussing drug testing at the national championships,” said Gillette.
If approved, formal drug education would precede testing.
“One of the stipulations within the drug testing policy for postseason play is education for our student-athletes specific to performance-enhancing drugs and what our potential national drug testing policy would be,” said Gillette. “You don’t want to start drug testing student-athletes at these championships and yet they didn’t know anything about that possibility.”
If the initiatives are approved at the convention in April, Gillette speculated that the program would get moving quickly.
“Drug education at our institutional level would begin as early as 2015-16, and that would include—if there’s a policy at that point—to educate those student-athletes on a postseason drug testing policy, with drug testing potentially for 2016-17,” said Gillette, though she made clear that this timeline was unofficial.
Gillette and Meredith both said that the implementation of the program at its core would be for the benefit of the athletes.
“Our council of presidents wants us to focus on our student-athletes and make sure we’re putting our students in the best position possible to be healthy overall, both academically and within their sports,” said Gillette. “The whole point of [drug testing] is to be a deterrent, and if that can deter our student-athletes from using drugs, that’s important to the presidents,” said Gillette.
So far the reaction has been positive, but some details still need to be ironed out.
“Our members are very much behind coming up with a policy that works for everybody involved,” said Meredith.
“But, obviously, costs and who’s going to share the burden of those costs or take the whole burden of those costs on is what’s really behind the discussion,” he added.
Discussions regarding shared financial responsibilities rarely go smoothly, so member schools will only know for sure what course of action the NAIA will take after the April conference.
Read about Saint Xavier’s current athletics drug policy and reaction to possible changes in next week’s issue of The Xavierite.
Tim Carroll
Senior Sports Editor